Bands such as Kansas and Styx depressed me (literally, physiologically) then and now with their portentous playing, the particular way that they, especially Styx, fused classical music into pop rock and with their lyrics - which borrowed from fantastic tales of world mythology but somehow managed to make them sound boring or even kitsch. Interestingly (or not), Supertramp didn't have that effect on me. There is a brightness and a lack of excess in some of their songs that kept them from sounding morally defeating to me, as so many other bands from that era did. They did, however, suffer from what I might call "the alienation of mass scale.” It seems like they only existed as stadium rock. And I don't just mean where they performed, but that it was part of their essence – you could almost feel the music industry enveloping them, projecting them out into the public. I find that scale and that identity to be incredibly alienating.
Soft rock (not at all an oxymoron) also emerged from the detritus of the 60s and bands such as Air Supply provoke actual physiological depression in me for different reasons than the bong store baroque of the bands mentioned above. Soft rock provokes in me feelings of claustrophobia, lightheadedness, an inability to breathe properly. It mimics the feeling I used to get when my mother would take me to fabric stores, whose towering bolts I could never hope to see over when I was only about 3 feet tall. I think the feeling comes from the arrangement/production design of the songs. Everything sounds quite saturated. Add to that, the reduced tempo of the music and you begin to feel like you’re hearing the music from the inside of a full mayonnaise jar.
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